One of the most nightmarish Christmas travel foul-ups in recent memory was …

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Twelve inches of snow and ice, road closures, and a pesky overflow bug contributed to one of the worst holiday airline messes in recent years. I was stuck in the Cincinnati airport for a while and at the time, most people there attributed the problems to the snow and poor planning on the part of Delta/Comair. It's doubtful that many people (except the nerdy guy I saw wearing a Firefox t-shirt) were considering the possibility that a software malfunction may have ultimately triggered the final meltdown.

At the core of the problem was an application created by SBS, a subsidiary of Boeing. What happened on SBS's system is that the massive ice and weather delays necessitated an abnormally high number of crew reassignments which overflowed a hard limit of 32,768 changes per month. The result being that the application either crashed, stopped working, or began acting irrationally. With this critical system out of play, no one knew where send people or where to get crewmembers for new and rescheduled flights. The application crash, on top of weather delays and a lack of glycol to de-ice the planes caused the cancellation of thousands of flights in and out of the Cincinnati airport only days before Christmas.

One of the most critical elements in orchestrating a successful airline is managing your human resources. Crews need to be routed from incoming flights to their outgoing flights and the number of hours they work needs to be monitored and taken into account. This needs to be done for hundreds if not thousands of crewmembers, so its obvious why a computer application is well suited to juggling all of this information; an entire team of skilled people would be required just to keep things flowing properly. Nick Miller, Comair spokesman, commented on running without computer support:

"It's a very complex choreographed operating system. There are manual processes that you can implement, but they are still very time intensive,"

What's probably the least comforting news to the people who had to sleep in the airport is that if this massive storm had hit the Midwest next month, there probably wouldn't have been any issues. In a strange twist of fate, the outdated system that failed last week was due for an upgrade in January.